President Obama on Monday touted the Environmental Protection Agency’s extremely strict new rules regulating carbon emissions for electricity generation, the final details of which were announced abruptly over the weekend.

Why are these rules so much more stringent than ones Obama had proposed earlier? The best explanation has nothing to do with science and everything to do with an administration seeking to boost its moral authority on the issue of climate change. There is a United Nations climate summit in Paris coming up this December. Obama does not believe he can bully developing countries into hobbling their economies unless he can claim he is hobbling his own country’s economy first.